Milestone

When the pandemic hit and everyone was forced to work from home, we ended up changing quite a few things around the Mild Home. I mean, how could we not? For example, I now had to sit in a chair in front of a laptop for hours at a time. That thought had just plain never occurred to me. The idea was that I would do my work in the office and if I occasionally needed to put in a long day, I could do a couple of hours at most from home. There's a big difference between a chair that's acceptable for two hours and a chair that's acceptable for eight hours.

One of the other notable changes was in my morning routine. Notably, we invested in an exercise bike so that the Mild Wife and I could still get some cardio from home. Sure, we could run outside, but between the worry of masking up and the weather being chilly for good chunks of that time, it never seemed like a fully reliable option. As a result, I ended up using the exercise bike for roughly enough time to finish a couple of quests/tasks in a phone game. It's not a very scientific measurement, but it works.

On the other hand, the bike itself does track some fairly precise numbers. For example, it knows precisely how long you've been pedaling. It can do use a few of those numbers in combination to produce even more data. If one were to take the amount of time pedaled, the revolutions per minute, and the resistance setting, one could figure out how much energy was expended to keep the pedals moving. The bike tends to show that as "Calories burned," but it's basically just measuring energy.

I mention all of this because the Mild Wife and I tend to glance at some of those numbers when we hop off the bike. I don't think either of us is super religious about any of those numbers, but it's nice to see what we've accomplished over the course of a bike ride. Some of those numbers are cumulative, so we can see milestones we've hit over the life of the bike. To my surprise, we seem to have hit a milestone recently:

Yup, 1000 miles

When I saw that, I actually tried to remember whether that was in miles or kilometers, but after a bit of consternation and some Google searches, I settled on the fact that that was in miles. So, the Mild Wife and I have ridden over 1000 miles on that bike. I obviously can't claim full credit for that, but that seemed like a pretty cool milestone to hit. I mean, if nothing else, that's proof that we've been productive during the pandemic, right?

Now I'm curious how long it'll take us to ride the next 1000 miles, but I suppose time will tell. I'm sure it'll lead to a small victory dance when that happens.